It’s not easy to immediately put what you learned into action (you might understand a subject theoretically but might not be comfortable enough with the subject to put it into practice).

Disclaimer: I received this book for free through the O’Reilly Blogger program. is a very short “book” on RFID (Radio Frequency Identification), a way to tag and identify objects over varying ranges, and how to use Arduino to create a few interesting RFID projects.

The authors go on to talk about setting up an annotation project: determining your goal, creating your model/specification, and creating/storing your annotations in a flexible but easy to create (by annotators) manner. I had no previous experience in this area, but I had no trouble understanding the subject matter for the most part.

Here are some of the notes I took while reading the book: When you run an Xcode project from a standard (i.e., non-admin) user, you might be asked to enter credentials of a user in the “Developer Tools group.” You can fix this by adding the (current) user to the group: When you purchase something from the Mac App Store, you’ll see a little icon in your dock, but that doesn’t show you the percentage of progress.

Disclaimer: I received this book for free through the O’Reilly Blogger program. When you see “I am a sentence I am another sentence,” you know that you’re really looking at two different sentences even though the period between “sentence” and “I” is missing.

If you try something similar with the computer (try leaving the semi-colon off in C or miss an indent in Python, for example), you’ll get a nasty error message.

The book assumes that you have some experience with Arduino and micro-controllers (i.e., do you know what a breadboard, jumper wires, and circuits are? We start with a very brief introduction to RFID, follow up with two introductory technical tutorials on Arduino, and end with a fairly simple home automation project: Between my officemate and me, we have dozens of devices drawing power in our office: two laptops, two monitors, four or five lamps, a few hard drives, a soldering iron, Ethernet hubs, speakers, and so forth.

Even when we’re not here, the room is drawing a lot of power.

When either of us comes into the room, all we have to do is tap our key fobs on a reader mounted by the door, and the room turns on or off what we normally use. The reader by the door reads the presence or absence of the tags.